User Reviews

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In the evening, Constance reads the novel "the reader". She likes this novel so much that she ends up identifying with the heroine of the novel, Marie. Her job is to read several pages of any book to her customers including a disabled teenager called Eric, a stressed businessman or a little girl whose name is Coralie...

Michel Deville, the director transmits us the joy and the comfort her main character brings to her customers reading pages of Baudelaire, Carroll or Marguerite Duras. Marie thanks to her nice voice, her passion of reading, her shiny presence make people happy and eventually makes the spectator happy. In a way, like "the hairdresser's wife" (1990), a beautiful movie by Patrice Leconte, "la lectrice" is one of these rare films where you smile during almost all the projection. It is the opportunity for Miou Miou to find one of her very best roles too and she offers us a delightful composition. She's the real major asset of the film.

"La Lectrice" is a smart, poetic movie with sparkling dialogs and ingenious sequences where the pleasure of words joins the pleasure of pictures. Another good point: a rightly chosen classical music mainly used in the moments where you see Marie walking down the streets of Arles between two reading sessions. The music gives the movie an impression of lightness and well-being. Besides, I feel that everything here breathes joy of living and even if the end of the movie remains a little dark (Marie by refusing to read an extract from a Sade novel is becoming jobless), we can detect a message of hope in Constance's intention of becoming a reader: reading must be conserved in a society where books occupy a less and less important place.

Michel Deville's movie won the Louis Delluc price in 1988. It was only fair.

One SHINWA has made some scathing remarks about this film, and has passed judgment on the script as well as the direction and even the motivation of the leading actress who (in company with the rest of the cast) gives a most satisfying and believable performance. The character does not indeed refuse to read Sade for her client, she declines to give a second reading of it to an audience including two other men, invited by her client without prior consultation. SHINWA goes on to accuse the character of duel standards because she refused to read Sade, yet earlier leaps into bed with one of her clients; they are both adult and both play the game, she exercises her will as an adult woman in both this and the Sade episode, and I don't know where SHINWA'S notion that the actress bares her crotch has come from, certainly not from this rather wonderful and light hearted film. I can only think that Shinwa considers this film to be unworthy because it fails to meet the high intellectual standards of Shinwa. Unfortunately for all the people who think this way, films are made for anyone to enjoy and must therefore stoop a little every now and then as well as excel. Believe me, this film has nothing to apologize about, it is a beautiful little romp, and the music (composed by a first class bloke who knew what he was doing)is a true delight and so very fitting.

I want to indicate a thing of literary merit—a passage from Marx that Constance/Marie reads to the old Bolshevik lady.This makes it the third place where the existence of such exciting things is seized in Marx's works—Noica did this,pointing out such literary beauties in Marx's journalism.The second such place that I found was in Simmel.And this film is the third.I guess that such things could be find in Baudrillard also (and perhaps somewhere in the many French Structuralist Marxists who wrote in the '50s-'70s …);anyway,the pointing of the Marx's works' literary charm is something interesting.The quote given in this film is remarkably well chosen.As a writer,Marx was much better than the cohort of his trite followers.But this was here a literary parenthesis;anyway,the literary source offered the material for a postmodern piece of fun.

The film has a level of competence and fun that certainly makes it agreeable and interesting—on a medium level,just enough to maintain it above the ridiculous.The passion for reading transforms, changes invariably into something else—or is already something else,or it is a bridge to a sphere of the life that has a more banal dimension;not even one case of passion for reading,as everyone wants something else from this and reading is but a pretext.So,it is more about various ways of misusing reading.All Constance/Marie's clients want something else from her,another form of fun.

One of the main deficiencies is the length:the film is obviously overlong.With this director's footage, a 40' movie would of been much better. Sylvette Héry 's hips and thighs are indeed beautiful and well-filmed,but the sexual side of The Reader is mishandled.The director lacked the necessary cinematographic culture and subtlety for such a movie.In conclusion,the movie is average and less amusing and beautiful than it could be.

Better scripted,and much better conceived and made,this could of been one of the best surrealist films.It was obviously above the director's aptitudes.It is interesting to think about who would of been suited for such a movie;a direction could of been explored by Truffaut.It would of been even less surrealist than it is in its actual director's hands,but it would of had style and more charm. Truffaut was the man for the graceful fairy ingenuity needed here.Another direction could of been explored by Bunuel—and then,the surrealism would of reached the heights.Anyway,one feels here the existence of a material for much better movies.It has potential.